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There’s a certain satisfying sense of justice about watching the gun stocks plunge while they’re still burying first-graders in Newtown.

At least for me: I hate guns. I think that every gun owner harboring fantasies about using a weapon to stop crime or tyranny should ask themselves how firearms ownership worked out for Nancy Lanza and the people of her town.

Guns didn’t shoot kids, of course; Adam Lanza did. And as a parent of a wonderful, sociable teenage son with Asperger’s Syndrome who is nothing like Adam, I’m furious about Lanza’s immoral choice, its painful toll and potential to stigmatize other boys with Asperger’s. And yes, my son plays Call of Duty, and no, I’m not entirely comfortable with that.

But it was Nancy Lanza’s guns, not her son’s video games, that helped him kill quickly, with military efficiency. Safety restrictions on firearms are now rightly on the national agenda. And gun makers are suddenly too hot to handle, pariahs on clearance sale.

Private-equity group Cerberus has hastily announced plans to free itself from ownership of Freedom Group, the collection of gun brands that includes the Bushmaster semi-automatic used by Adam Lanza. Cerberus relies on investments by the big employee pension funds, and the one for California teachers has already said it is re-evaluating the relationship.

Stock-market investors have followed suit by unloading publically traded Sturm, Ruger (RGR) and Smith & Wesson (SWHC), ahead of potential sales by pension funds. There are now headline-driven traders’ playthings, technically broken and subject to all sorts of sudden moves based on the perceived threat of further regulation.

I would love to conclude that the industry is screwed, headed for popular abandonment and a government crackdown. Unfortunately, that’s patently not the case. As Gallup notes, the initial impulse toward stricter gun rules in the wake of mass shootings has seldom translated into lasting support; in fact the 20-year trend has been all the other way, with support for new restrictions at an all-time low last year.

That could be because, as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post points out, the rate of killings in the US has been is steep long-term decline, although it remains far above the norm for advanced countries. Recent FBI statistics show murders by firearm down from 10,129 in 2007 to 8,583 last year, having declined each year in between.

For the growing ranks of gun enthusiasts who defeated a Newtown attempt to restrict target practice at impromptu ranges and a push for a statewide ban on high-capacity gun magazines before the tragedy, such restrictions seemed statistically unwarranted.

They are not likely to change their minds in the wake of Newtown any more than most of the gun enthusiasts in Congress, even though it’s obvious that 30-round magazines allow mass murderers to aim for records, and despite solid evidence from places like Australia that stricter rules save lives.

There are so many gun enthusiasts like Nancy Lanza in Newtown that all the legal local firing ranges have long waiting lists. This is the gun culture all around us, bolstered by years of booming sales. These are the people who are already rushing out to buy Bushmasters before the gummint bans them.

And while the gun stocks now look like casualties, in the long run all the many customers who feel empowered by a trigger pull will see them through.